Election Reform, Fraud and Related News. Sunday 01/06/07

Election Reform, Fraud and Related News. Sunday 01/06/07

Can You Count on Voting Machines?

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: January 6, 2008

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=all

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Doubts about e-voting whip up scramble for paper ballots
By George Merritt

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Article Launched: 01/06/2008 03:18:35 AM PST

DENVER -- With the presidential race in full swing, Colorado and other states have found critical flaws in the accuracy and security of their electronic voting machines, forcing officials to scramble to return to the paper ballots they abandoned after the Florida debacle of 2000.

In December alone, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that widely used voting equipment is unfit for elections.

"Every system that is out there, one state or another has found that they are no good," said John Gideon of the advocacy group Voters Unite. "Everybody is starting to look at this now and starting to realize that there is something wrong."

The swing states of California, Ohio and Florida have found that security on touch-screen voting machines is inadequate. Testers have been able to disable the systems and even change vote totals.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_7896804?source=rss&nclick_check=1

GREENVILLE, S.C. South Carolina election officials say they still plan to use touch-screen voting machines despite the fact that other states have banned the use of similar systems made by the same company.

Last month, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that Election Systems and Software's iVotronic is unfit for elections.

The ban was prompted by a study done for the state of Ohio in which researchers found that electronic voting systems could be corrupted with magnets or with handheld electronic devices, such as Treos.

"We've reviewed the report and we remain confident in the security and accuracy of South Carolina's voting system," state Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said.

http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20080106/APN/801060672

Cuyahoga County hurriedly switching to new voting system
By JOE MILICIA
Associated Press Writer

CLEVELAND (AP) - Cuyahoga County will be one of two counties in Ohio and possibly the largest one in the country to use a voting system for its 2008 primary in which all of the paper ballots are counted at one location.

The county is hurriedly switching from electronic touch-screen machines to an optical-scan system for the March 4 primary after prodding from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who considers the optical-scan machines to be more secure. Ballots also would be counted in a central location, rather than at the precinct level.


Van Wert County on the state's western edge also is moving to an optical-scan system for March, and Brunner wants all 55 other counties that use touch screens to switch by November - at an estimated cost of $31 million.

With more than 1 million registered voters, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, dwarfs many others that use a system in which paper ballots are filled out by voters then returned to a central location - the Board of Election's warehouse on East 40th Street - to be scanned and counted.

http://www.marionstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/NEWS01/801060321

Jury backs voting machines
County urged to resume their use
By JIM JOHNSON
Herald Salinas Bureau
Article Last Updated: 01/06/2008 02:04:34 AM PST

Ignoring much of the criticism and controversy surrounding electronic voting, the Monterey County civil grand jury gave the local use of touch-screen voting machines a big thumbs-up in its recently released report.

Devoting five of its 67 pages to electronic voting, the 2007 grand jury found that the county elections department's security measures are so effective that the Sequoia ACV Edge Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines used in local balloting represent "a secure and cost-effective method of voting."

The report also played down California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's concerns about the machines' potential vulnerability, suggesting that her investigation was flawed and overreaching.

In its conclusion, the grand jury indicated there should be "unlimited use" of touch-screen voting machines in Monterey County, and recommended that the board of supervisors and county registrar of voters should "work diligently and as quickly as possible" to resume using the touch-screen machines "at all County precincts without conditions."

http://www.montereyherald.com/ci_7895801?source=rss&nclick_check=1

Helping people vote is in her blood

ELECTIONS: In career, Growden's focus has ranged from tiny towns to the whole state.

The Associated Press
Published: January 6th, 2008 12:33 AM
Last Modified: January 6th, 2008 01:03 AM

FAIRBANKS -- The next time you vote -- not at the upcoming presidential caucuses, but at any other federal or state election -- take a look around.

Somewhere in the polling place, there will be an electronic voting machine that allows handicapped voters to cast ballots alone. There might be an electronic counter, but there's always a paper ballot.

And if you happen to be in District 36, there will be ballots available in the Philippine language of Tagalog.

And that's just on voting day. The state's Division of Elections starts planning a fall election in January; it registers votes and puts together election pamphlets to tell voters what they're voting on.

The division is working to improve voter outreach, voting equipment and election workers' training, according to Shelly Growden of Fairbanks, who's worked in the division for most of the last 17 years.

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/256268.html

Town meetings set to review ballots and voting machines

By GEORGE BENNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 05, 2008

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson will host four town-hall meetings across the county this month to discuss the Jan. 29 elections and the switch later this year from electronic voting to paper ballots.

The informational sessions will include demonstrations of the county's touch-screen voting machines and information on the optical-scan ballots that will be used in the fall elections. Attendees will be able to ask questions, register, update their voter information and sign up to be poll workers.

The meeting dates and sites: Monday, 7 p.m., at Delray Beach city hall. Wednesday, 6 p.m., at Glades Central High School in Belle Glade.

More at link:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/01/05/0105ELEX.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=76

Residents debate paper ballot merits

January 5, 2008
BY JOE HANEL | Journal Denver Bureau

DENVER - The battle over voting machines isn't over yet.

Dozens of residents came to the state Capitol on Thursday to give their opinions about how to run the 2008 election.

Last month, Secretary of State Mike Coffman decertified the electronic voting machines used by some of the state's largest counties. The machines from La Plata and Montezuma counties passed Coffman's tests.

Coffman wants to use paper ballots statewide, with limited use of electronic machines for disabled voters.

On Thursday, residents spoke for four hours to support Coffman's idea or poke holes in it.

http://www.cortezjournal.com/asp-bin/article_generation.asp?article_type=news&article_path=/news/news080105_10.htm

Thanks, sfexpat2000! :hug:

High court to consider Indiana law on voter ID


Rule called unfair barrier; state says it deters fraud
By Sylvia A. Smith
Washington editor

WASHINGTON – When Hoosiers must produce a photo ID before they vote, is it a straightforward protection against phantom voters or a subtle way to reduce the number of ballots cast by Democratic-leaning poor people and minorities?

The Supreme Court will hear all sides Wednesday morning when, for an hour, civil rights lawyers will take their best shot at Indiana’s 3-year-old law requiring a driver’s license or other picture identification before any Hoosier visits the polling booth on Election Day.

Lawyers for the state will defend the statute, which is similar to laws other states have passed but is the strictest in the U.S. Opponents will say it is an unconstitutional intrusion on Americans’ right to vote.

Advocates on both sides agree voter ID laws might deter some people from voting. What they disagree about is whether there’s enough fraud to warrant the tougher rules and whether the photo ID requirement is much of a barrier to voting.

http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/NEWS03/801060306

HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe's electoral agency said it has concluded the delimitation of constituency boundaries for the March elections and ruled out postponment of the polls, state media reports said Sunday.

George Chiweshe, chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, said the commission said the agency would soon present a preliminary report on the exercise to President Robert Mugabe, the Sunday Mail reported.

"What is left, however, is to polish up the preliminary report, which we will soon present to the president," Chiweshe was quoted as saying.

He said the commission had created more than 2,000 boundaries for the local government wards, adding that "the boundaries should make sense and should be reasonable enough so as not to cause confusion."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080106/wl_africa_afp/zimbabwepoliticsvote_080106121714

Those stolen African elections


Posted online: Monday, January 07, 2008 at 0000 hrs Print Email
The international community must insist on a recount or a fresh vote in Kenya.

The Indian Express

The mayhem that killed hundreds of people following Kenya’s election on December 27th completes a depressing cycle of democratic abuses in Africa’s biggest countries. Nigeria held its own mockery of an election last April. Scores were killed and observers pronounced it the most fraudulent poll they had ever witnessed. Congo held a more or less peaceful election in October 2006, since when the main opposition leader has been hounded into exile. And the year before that, flawed elections in Ethiopia resulted in the deaths of 199 protesters. Needless to say, the incumbents all won.

Indian Express Election News Economic Times

So it is easy to be angry, as well as gloomy, about African leaders’ continual betrayal of the democratic values they say they hold so dear. And all the more so in the case of Kenya, which has a strong tradition of holding elections, a vibrant political culture, a relatively free press and a sophisticated economy. Given these advantages, Kenya had an opportunity to “set an example” to Africa and hold free and fair elections. But (it) blew it.

Or, more precisely, the political elite blew it. A small cabal of politicians almost certainly stole the result by fraud. In the parliamentary vote, President Mwai Kibaki’s ruling party was routed. Yet in the presidential vote Mr Kibaki emerged victorious at the last moment and had himself sworn in only a few minutes later, forestalling pleas from all sides... for a pause to investigate mounting claims of malpractice. The report of the European observers was unusually strong in its condemnation of the count.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/258511.html

Voters May Bring Class Action Lawsuit
Lawyer Asks Metro To Pay For Identity Protection

POSTED: 6:15 am CST January 6, 2008
UPDATED: 1:22 pm CST January 6, 2008
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Some registered voters are asking Metro to pay up to prevent identity theft of up to 337,000 voters.

A class action lawsuit filed asks the city to buy credit monitoring for voters and is asking for quick action.

Channel Four's Cara Kumari reported that he fallout continues from the theft of two laptop computers at the Metro Election Commission.

Now, a class-action lawsuit filed by three voters is asking the city, the security company and the subcontractor to pay to try and protect all voters.

http://www.wsmv.com/news/14987940/detail.html?rss=nash&psp=news

U.S. Supreme Court to hear voter ID case this week
Sunday, Jan 6, 2008

By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK - Legislative supporters say a recent study could breathe new life into their failed effort to require Arkansas voters to show photo identification when they go to the polls.

Problem is, the University of Missouri study of an Indiana law that concluded the photo ID requirement does not lessen voter turnout is countered by a separate study of the same state law that says it does, which opponents of the Arkansas measure argued successfully during the 2007 regular session.

The U.S. Supreme Court will settle the legal dispute, beginning with oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could hold implications for the November general election.

Dale Charles, president of the NAACP in Arkansas, said a voter photo ID would be a deterrent and compared the requirement to the poll tax enacted to keep blacks from voting in the Jim Crow-era South.

http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2008/01/06/News/344745.html

January 6, 2008
BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

... am not one for conspiracy theories, but it is hard to overlook the fact that the push for pictured ID over the last two decades has come almost entirely from Republicans and that the people least likely to have such ID are the poor, who for decades have voted largely Democratic.

Consider Michigan: Republican-controlled Legislatures in 1996 and 2005 passed bills requiring pictured ID to vote. The laws were never implemented because of an opinion from longtime state Attorney General Frank Kelley that such a requirement would be unconstitutional. Democrat Kelley said it violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of laws, and the 15th, covering voting rights. Last July, a Michigan Supreme Court dominated by Republican-nominated justices, reversed Kelley. Writing the majority opinion in the 5-2 ruling, Justice Robert Young said the pictured ID requirement was "a reasonable, nondiscriminatory restriction designed to preserve the purity of elections." Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, a Republican, put the rule in place for November's local elections.

There were some complaints about it, but nothing major. The Secretary of State's Office says about 370,000 of Michigan's 7 million registered voters have neither a driver's license nor state ID card (presumably no passport, either) but the Michigan law does provide that these folks can cast a ballot by signing an affidavit of identity.

That's less restrictive than the Indiana requirement, which is the subject of the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Nationally, 21 million Americans lack a government-issued ID with a photograph on it, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which has filed a brief opposing the law ...

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080106/COL32/801060564/1068/OPINION

GO DIGG IT!



January 6, 2008

Commentary on NYTimes: Can You Count On These Machines?

By Dave Berman

Originally blogged at We Do Not Consent:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/nytimes-can-you-count-on-these-machines.html

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a 7800+ word feature story on electronic voting, "Can You Count On These Machines?" The column is already online, spanning ten pages on the NYT website. As I read it I excerpted many passages I thought I might want to comment on, collectively about 1/3 of the article. As I work through a second pass to lay it out for you here, I will try to limit that further. For starters I would say the article really doesn't provide much substantial new information and performs worse still as a matter of framing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html

January 6, 2008
Can You Count On These Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON

This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.

...

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County...Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes...No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working - until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.

...

Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices "flip" from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 - even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person "undervote" for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

So opens the expose, providing a little background and clearly setting the stage for the no basis for confidence meme, which is never explicitly stated. In fact, for the appearance of balance, the article goes on to quote renowned electronic voting machine apologist Michael Shamos, who often gives the appearance of acknowledging real problems while simultaneously minimizing and discounting them with subtle reframing:

It's difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he told me. "But they're very disturbing to the public."

The majority of this article shows Shamos' quote to be ridiculous on its face. With such limited auditing of the machines we can't really know what percentage of them fail nor can we know the true extent of known failures. What we know is that our elections are unverifiable so the outcomes are necessarily inconclusive. Such inherent uncertainty is fueled by paperless electronic voting machines that prohibit the possibility of a recount:

During this year's presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=genera_dave_ber_080105_commentary_on_nytime.htm

GO DIGG IT!

:woohoo::woohoo::woohoo:

January 6, 2008

Back to the Future: Democracy that Works
By Nancy Tobi

NOTE: This article was written for publication in the soon-to-be-released book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (Paperback)
by New York Times bestselling author, Mark Crispin Miller.

You can read about the book and pre-order a copy at Amazon..com.

Back to the Future: Democracy that Works, By Nancy Tobi

The United States of America is a democratic republic, a system of governance that derives its power from the people. This is every citizen's birthright, protected by free, fair, and open elections, owned and operated by We the People.

Private corporations have laid claim to our birthright since the 1978 Supreme Court decision giving corporations First Amendment "rights" to influence political campaigns.

Corporations didn't stop with political campaigns. They've made significant inroads into the actual drafting and passage of our laws and, most treacherously, in running our elections.

Against this backdrop we can understand what's wrong with our election systems, and how to repair them. We'll examine the smoke and the mirrors behind 21st century election reform. We'll recall lessons from our national heritage and from the State of New Hampshire, whose Constitution was the first written and second ratified in the country, and whose foundational traditions of grassroots democracy continue to flourish to this day.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=opedne_nancy_to_080106_back_to_the_future_3a_.htm

january 3, 2008

Contact: Jennifer McNulty (831) 459-4399; jmcnulty@ucsc.edu
Voter disenfranchisement and election hacking are the focus of two documentaries that will be screened for free at UCSC in January


American Blackout will screen Jan. 15.

The public is invited to attend free screenings at UC Santa Cruz of two powerful documentaries about voting irregularities: American Blackout, which presents evidence of the disenfranchisement of African American voters in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, and Hacking Democracy, which investigates the reliability of electronic voting machines.

American Blackout will be shown Tuesday, January 15, at 7 p.m. in the Cowell College Dining Hall on the UCSC campus. Hacking Democracy will be presented Tuesday, January 29, at 7 p.m. in the Stevenson Event Center at UCSC. Both films will be followed by discussions. They are being presented by Cowell College.

The Los Angeles Times described American Blackout as "a muckracking indictment of ... the systematic disenfranchisement of African American voters." The film chronicles recurring patterns of voter disenfranchisement while following Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's investigation of the elections. Directed by Ian Inaba of Guerilla News Network, American Blackout has received numerous awards, including a Special Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and the Best Documentary Award at the 2006 Cinequest Film Festival.

In the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris taps the expertise of computer scientists, politicians, and activists before concluding that the top-secret computerized systems that count approximately 80 percent of votes in public elections across the United States are fallible and vulnerable to undetectable hacking. Hacking Democracy was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=48727